Stories of Land and Place: A Small Town Perspective
Reclamation of the Past in Franklin

by Robert Hicks

I didn't move to Franklin in 1974 because of any passion for the Civil War. Don't laugh. I know folks who have done just that. I moved to Franklin because I wanted to live in a small town near Nashville with some sense of place, in time and history. Growing up in South Florida in the 1960s, everything was about today, everything seemed new. I didn't want to live in the past. I just wanted to live in a place that actually had a past.

Yet, I should be clear; Franklin in 1974 was very different from Franklin in 2007. It was a small town with a dying Main Street where Dairy Queen was the only place you could get a hamburger on Sunday night. After the "Black picture show" closed down in the early 70s, the only remaining movie theater in the county would close up a year or so after I arrived. Franklin seemed to be going "gentle into that good night" like so many small towns.

I didn't want to live in the past. I just wanted to live in a place that actually had a past.

Then everything changed. Thanks to the far-sightedness of a handful of preservationists, Main Street was not only "saved" but was rehabbed into a charming, Disney-like setting. This was done in spite of many in the community who thought it simply putting good money after bad. The fight was hard won, but it was won, and most of the fierce opposition either died off over the years or somehow remembers Main Street's rebirth as their own invention. Most odd to me is that I have lived to see a whole generation of folks move here, including many of the local politicos, who think it always looked this way. They probably think that Main Street at Disney World always looked that way too.

Seemingly overnight, Franklin became "charming" and a place where folks wanted to live. Some of those strongest opponents of preserving and rehabbing Main Street have grown very rich from the boom of development resulting from it.

With this growth has come the inevitable loss of our "layered history." Like I said, it was inevitable. Yet, that which had always been here began to disappear even more quickly than I had expected.

When I first moved here I thought the Battle of Franklin was a bunch of streets named after dead Confederate generals. It was the Pizza Hut — when we finally got a Pizza Hut — built on the spot (or near the spot, depending on who was telling it) where General Patrick Cleburne fell.

As much as Franklin touted itself as "Historic Franklin," the Battle of Franklin seemed to be the 800-pound gorilla of our history. As recently as four years ago, one of the early preservation leaders in our community's rebirth remarked that nothing really important happened in Franklin during the war. She was only expressing Franklin's own revisionist history that began within days after the war ended. Sometimes the truth is too hard a hand to play. I believe my community's rewriting of history happened for several reasons.

Pizza Hut
This restaurant once stood on a portion of the Franklin battlefield where much of the bloodiest fighting occured. The site was purchased by the city and is now a public park. [photo: Eric Jacobson]

The most obvious reason was the fact that unlike most other battles, the Battle of Franklin was not fought miles from an urban area, but right next to town. In the years after the war, which ended only a few months later thanks in part to this battle, the former battlefield was primed for development. Development is nothing new to Franklin and in those years after the war some of Franklin's earliest movement outward was on top of the epicenter of its killing-fields. If in truth the battle had been important, then it would be hard to justify cutting up such hallowed ground.

While local politicians and developers dismissed the importance of the battle to justify their own greed, not everyone did. Within the community there remained a wee small voice of folks who thought there was something important to be remembered. Outside the community a much larger voice claimed something important happened here. Congress moved twice to save the battlefield and create a national park. Twice the local politicians and developers rose up and ended such nonsense.

I've concluded that the very reason folks in Congress wanted to save the battlefield was the very reason that folks around Franklin let the local politicians and developers rule the day. If Wiley Sword and all the other historians are right and this really was "The Confederacy's Last Hurrah," then why would we want to commemorate where the "Old South Died" when every other white community in the South was touting they were where the "Old South Lived?"

Like the rest of the South in those years after Reconstruction, white Franklin put up its monument to the "Lost Cause" on the square. Yet, though it commemorated the Southern sons who fought for the Confederacy, it never got around to singling out even the Confederates who died at Franklin. Franklin was ashamed of its role in history.

Our first goal was to unite a much divided preservation community. Within months, over ten separate organizations across color lines united into a coalition known as Franklin's Charge.

The only real monument to the battle, a cenotaph built by the students of Battle Ground Academy to the memory of General Cleburne, was torn down, with little or no protest, when the land it stood upon changed hands.

After all, a town of around 2,500 souls crawled out of their cellars on December 1st, 1864 to find around 9,200 dead and dying boys. No wonder folks were willing to let the battlefield disappear.

That is the town I called home. Yet there remained that wee small voice of folks who said something important happened here. Sadly enough, their voices were often mixed with the voice of folks who wanted to live in the past and justify what cannot be justified. This is about where I came into the story.

About four years ago now, I asked six community leaders to join me on the back porch at Carnton Plantation. I told them that I wanted us to save the largest remaining undeveloped track of the battlefield, a golf course next to Carnton, that was about to be developed into anywhere from forty-six to ninety-one home sites. Though common sense would tell any sane human that with land going for fifty to sixty thousand dollars an acre it was a bit late to be talking about a battlefield park, the point was that it was now or never. Fortunately, the group bought into the vision.

Our first goal was to unite a much divided preservation community. Within months, over ten separate organizations across color lines united into a coalition known as Franklin's Charge. A few months later I went to Washington to talk to a couple with deep family roots in Franklin. Eventually, they purchased the golf course with the goal of Franklin's Charge buying it back from them.

Then, the new mayor of Franklin made a challenge during a dinner at my cabin. He envisioned the city paying up to two and a half million dollars toward the purchase of the property, if the private sector raised the rest of the five million dollars it would take.

Eastern Flank
Former site of the Franklin Country Club, the Eastern Flank of the Franklin Battlefield is the largest battlefield reclamation site in North America. [photo: Eric Jacobson]

Out of that evening came the beginning of a private/public partnership that should be a model for every town in America. With a united and hard-working preservation community, the partnership raised the money in a record time of less than two years.

Now the golf course property is being studied and researched from near and far, and when its reclamation is complete, it will be "the largest battlefield reclamation in American history" according to the American Battlefield Protection Program, that arm of Congress that does such things.

So where do we stand in comparison to what other communities have done in the preservation of their battlefields? According to the Civil War Preservation Trust, there is no close second. No community in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, or anywhere else in this country has ever accomplished anything close to what has come out of Franklin.

And so it has happened. What the community once stopped will become a reality. There will be a battlefield park on a fraction of the actual battlefield, where men and women will someday come, not to honor generals or resurrect the "Lost Cause," but to remember that something very important once happened here — that men and boys fought and died here and out of those five tragic hours something bigger than all of them disappeared and something bigger than all of them was created.

Something important about whom and what we are has been saved. The Civil War is not Disney World. It is a terrible time in our nation's history. Its importance lies not in the fact that someone's ancestor fought for the North or for the South or was freed from bondage. The Civil War remains as Walt Whitman called it, "The defining moment in American history." If you came from Ecuador last year and are throwing your lot with this nation, then the Civil War is important, whether you understand it or not. All that we want to be was reborn out of those bloody years by the sacrifices made by so many. Franklin has finally come to face and to honor its past as it moves into the future. I believe it will be a better place because of it.

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